Thief of Words (23 page)
Annie started attacking. A new face came to her with each swing. Kathleen; Jack; that
Star-News
reporter with the dirty tie; Andrew Binder; her old city editor, Mark Snowridge; her fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Wenzel, who failed her in fingernail check; her former boss, Greg Leeland, who had issues with strong women; and finally herself—for overreacting, as usual.
Jack was free to sleep with whomever he wanted. They’d known each other less than a month. They hadn’t even hinted at the L word. They’d had great sex and great e-mails, but that didn’t mean he owed her exclusivity. In fact, he didn’t owe her anything. It wasn’t his fault that she’d taken it all to heart. She hadn’t understood till Saturday morning, when she was burning holes in the ceiling with her stare, just how needy she’d been when Jack DePaul entered her life.
“I was so ready for romance he could’ve recited me the god-damned alphabet and I’d have been planning our wedding,” Annie had told Laura the previous night. “And that fantasy he spun—that he could rewrite my past—well, shit, I never had a chance. He might as well have hooked me on crack cocaine.”
What Annie didn’t tell Laura was this: she’d thought she’d finally found the one. Jack DePaul, with his crooked teeth and banty cock chest. She’d thought she was his muse; he was certainly hers. For the first time in twenty years, she couldn’t wait to get in front of a keyboard again to see where her fingers took her. She’d loved the mysterious way words tumbled out of her mind and onto the screen. It was alchemy. But she’d stopped writing after the
Commercial-Appeal.
No, she didn’t tell Laura any of these things. She was too embarrassed.
“What’re you going to do if he keeps calling?” Laura had asked. “He’ll stop. He’s got Ms. Piano-Stool Legs back and that’s clearly what he wanted. He was probably just using me to make her jealous—and it obviously worked. Who knows, who cares? I’ve told Fred not to even tell me if he calls, not that he’s going to. I have no desire to talk to him. What would I say? ‘How many more snake slayers are there, Jack?’
“It’s over. And this way, I don’t have to deal with him about the
Commercial-Appeal
thing. Anyhow, this rewriting-my-past stuff— it was great while it lasted, but it’s time to put that to bed. In fact, it’s time to put my past to bed, period. I’ve got a present to think about.”
“Jab. Punch. Kick! Go girls. Yeah!” yelled MaryJo, exhorting them to new levels of pummelment. Annie followed ferociously, her T-shirt soaked through with sweat. MaryJo whipped her head Annie’s way and said, “Don’t mess with Annie. She’s on fire tonight.”
“Yeah, I’ve killed all my enemies,” Annie said with an uppercut to the air.
“That’s why we’re here,” MaryJo shouted into her headset. “That and this,” she said, slapping her taut butt. “Okay, last set. Let her rip. Let’s go.”
By the final jab, Annie wasn’t sure she could remain vertical. Her legs were wobbly, her arms shaking. She joined the other salsa ladies in a whoop of relief and joy when MaryJo finally clapped her hands together and said, “Good job. Time to eat.”
Before heading to the showers and sauna, Annie assessed the woman before her in the mirror. Did she look like someone whose Mr. Right had just turned into Mr. Schmuck? No. She looked tough and sweaty. Maybe a bit battered, but not beaten.
In a way, Jack DePaul could take some credit for her resilience. She’d loved falling in love and Jack had made it so easy. He was good, no question about it.
But that dream was shattered, and, surprisingly, she didn’t feel like retreating to her pile of books. She felt like trying again. Jack had made her hungry. Given her an appetite for more.
“Hey, Annie,” it was Lala, a towel around her neck. “You going straight home?”
“No, I’m not. Want to go for a smoothie? Maybe there’re some cute guys at Jamba Juice. And if we’re lucky, they like girls.”
J
ust about the time Annie was uppercutting her way to self-actualization, Jack was slumped in front of the Mac, still on the ropes, still reeling from the day’s body blows.
He’d spent the afternoon ignoring the curious looks and the buzzing newsroom. He chose, instead, to wallow in editing details and self-pity. “But it’s not my fault” was his mantra as he sat at his desk hunched like a hedgehog under attack. A little after five, Arts editor Mike Gray suggested kindly that, maybe, Jack should leave early.
“I’m not going to ask what’s going on,” he said, “but I think you and your little black cloud need to get out of here. Go to the gym; go get drunk; go. Do you want me to meet you at Sisson’s later? We can order boutique beers and watch the Lakers.”
“Thanks, Mike,” Jack said. “I think I’ll just go home. There’s some stuff I need to do.”
Stuff. Like trying to get to Annie. Phoning was out of the question, intermediaries were out, too—Laura would sooner help Pol Pot than Jack DePaul—and a direct assault didn’t seem wise. He briefly considered driving to D.C., but he was afraid she’d slam the door in his face or, worse, call the cops.
E-mail was his refuge. It had gotten him into this mess, maybe it would get him out. But what could he say? Just telling his side of the story wasn’t going to be enough. He could hardly believe the events himself, and he’d lived through them. How could he explain Kathleen Faulkner in fewer pages than
War and Peace
?
He knew that, somehow, he had to woo Annie all over again. But what words, what message, could soften a heart that must by now be as impervious to him as titanium? And the most important word of all wasn’t available. If “love” suddenly appeared, it would only make him look like a desperate con man hitting below the belt.
Jack sat in front of the screen absently eating popcorn. How can I make her believe?
Subject: The truth
Annie,
You’ve got to read this e-mail. You’ve got to give us a chance.
Nothing that happened Friday night in New York is what it seems. It was like a bad student film mixing slapstick and soap opera. It involved a jealous, lying former lover, an unlocked hotel room, a laptop left on, and incredible naivete on the part of the hapless protagonist—me.
I need to tell you the whole stupid saga in person. You’ll see in my face that I’m telling the truth. But until you let me back into your life, these words will have to do: I’m not seeing anybody else, I’m not having an affair with anybody else, I have never betrayed you or your trust in any way. The only woman I want in my life is you.
The only woman I want in my life is you.
I never realized how true those words were until now. Jack and Annie, Annie and Jack. It’s too good, it’s too right. We can’t let it be destroyed by an evil spirit from my past.
The past seems to be haunting us both. I don’t care about the Annie of the past. The Annie of New Jersey or North Carolina. All I care about is the now and future Annie. From now on, let’s create tomorrows, not yesterdays. That way, we can make them come true.
I want to make a lot of things come true. The list can be as long as our lives together. A trip in October. Close your eyes, you can image every scene….
We fly to Santa Fe and rent a car. We drive north to Colorado and west to Utah. From the Abajos, where the leaves of the aspens are as gold as Spanish doubloons, we turn south. Somewhere on Cedar Mesa we pull off onto an old fire road and drive through junipers and pinyon pines to the edge of a canyon. We stop, put on our backpacks, and climb down switchbacks toward the canyon floor about 400 feet below.
The sun is high; the rocks warm to the touch. The air smells dry and sharp. It’s clear, though a few mares’ tails brush the western horizon. The trail ends in a tricky stretch of slickrock so we slide on our butts the last 30 or 40 feet to a big juniper tree and climb down it to the canyon bottom.
It’s easy hiking there on hard-packed sand. You take the lead and I follow your voice like a trail. By late afternoon we’re far below the mesa top. On either side of us, the walls rise nearly straight up so, while the rims still burn orange and bright sienna, dusk arrives early to the trail.
A side canyon comes in from the right. Up against the sandstone monoliths that guard the confluence are the remains of an ancient pueblo. With its stony crenellations and empty windows, it looks like a tiny castle. Above the remains, a faded white disc is painted on the sheer sandstone cliff. Inside the disc are two circles the color of the rock beneath. The ghostly remains of a painted face.
We climb up a talus slope to the ruin and explore its seven tiny rooms—how small the builders must have been. On a flat spot that commands a view of both canyons we sit and watch the fading day and say something like this:
Jack: “They sat here, too.”
Annie: “Who?”
Jack: “The Anasazi. Eight hundred years ago. If Matthew were here, he could tell us all about them.”
Annie: “I wonder what they would think of us.”
Jack: “They would look at your hair, fall down on their knees, and worship you as a goddess.”
Annie: “Or eat me for dinner.”
We camp below the ruin. The temperature plummets at night, so we build a small fire near our tent and huddle by it, wrapped up in our sleeping bag. We sit so close to the flames my hiking boots start to smolder.
A pot of water boils all evening and from time to time we snake our hands out from the folds of the bag just long enough to make another cup of instant cocoa.
I recite you poems by Pablo and we play the explorer game. You say that if you had discovered Australia, you would have named it Koalaland. I vow that, if you give me the last swallow of cocoa, I’ll name it Annieland.
Mummied together in the bag, we watch the stars cataract between the canyon rims. We crawl into the tent before 10 o’clock and let the fire burn itself out. Somewhere an owl hoots.
In the middle of the night I awake out of a dream with your insistent hand on my shoulder.
“Jack,” you whisper, “there’s someone up there.” “Huh?”
“Up at the ruin. There’s someone up there.”
“What?” I whisper back, still half asleep.
“I was about to get up to pee—all that cocoa—when I heard some rocks falling. I looked out and saw somebody climbing to the ruin.”
I pull tent flaps aside. The moon, now high over the rim, is a fingernail paring away from full. “Jesus. It’s so bright out. Where is he? Can you still see him?”
“Look to where we were sitting at sunset. See—that black shape. That’s him.”
“Who is it? Who would hike around here in the middle of the night?”
“Maybe it’s…”
And then we hear someone singing. A man’s voice, deliberate and repetitive. Each syllable strikes the cold air like fingers against a drum, but they beat out no words that we can understand, just melancholy rhythms. We listen, arms around each other, afraid to move, afraid to break the spell.
The big moon climbs; the song goes on. And when it finally stops, maybe a half hour later, pieces of it seem to linger in the shadows. We look outside the flap. Above the ruin, the ghostly painted face glows in the reflected light—a little brother moon—but the dark shape of the singer is gone.
In the innocent brightness of the next morning, it’s hard to believe in the moon, let alone chanting in the night. When I wake up, you’re already outside. I stick my head out of the tent and see two fires to warm me. One is heating our pot of water; the other, lit by sunrise, is your hair. You’ve tied it up with a cotton band, about an inch and a half wide, woven in bright threads of green, turquoise, and red.
“That hair ribbon is beautiful,” I say. “Why haven’t you worn it before?”
You give me a curious look. “I haven’t worn it before because I just found it.”
“Found it?”
“This morning. It was looped around the center pole of our tent.”
In a magical canyon, moon meets moon and a woman is crowned by a singing spirit. Do you think this is just a fanciful story? It’s not.
Don’t give up on us, and we can make it real. This story and a thousand others.
Please call me. Please message me.
Jack
W
hen Annie woke up Tuesday morning, her legs were screaming, “No,” her arms were shrieking, “I hate you,” and her stomach? Well, her stomach was frozen in an Edvard Munchian wail of pain.
In that first moment of morning fog, Annie Hollerman couldn’t figure out why she felt like she’d gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson. Then she remembered.
“Oh man,” she groaned as she hobbled to the shower, “no more salsa boxing.”
An hour later she walked into her office, limped past Fred, and held up her hand to silence him.
“Don’t even ask,” she said. “I got a little carried away last night.”
Fred nodded and pretended to work. Under normal circumstances he would have called her Wonder Woman, told her to take up ballroom dancing, and perhaps quoted something pertinent from Shakespeare. But he knew she was hurting on a much deeper level than the muscular, so he remained silent.
Annie had gotten home late last night. She and Lala had talked for hours. Given Annie’s recent phone call with Kathleen Faulkner and Lala’s difficult divorce, the carcass of the male species had been picked clean.
Usually Annie checked her e-mail before turning in, but last night she went directly from her front door to her bed. And now there was payback in the form of forty-six new messages.
Had Annie been expecting to see something from Jack? Maybe. Probably. Yes. But that didn’t stop the sizzle of current that jolted her body when she saw jdepaul listed in new mail.
She looked at his name and for a split second she forgot about Kathleen and New York. For a split second, she was Annie the snake slayer of Hemet, California, ready for another trip to their past.
“Annie, are you alright?”
It was Fred, bringing her back to the present.
“He wrote me,” Annie said.
“I’m not surprised,” said Fred. “That is what he does, you know. By the way, I know you told me not to tell you, but he called yesterday. He was very distraught.”